Stereotypes about the EDL are mostly wrong

By Matthew Goodwin

— The far-right is in flux. According to the campaigning group Hope Not Hate, there are now more than 20 far-right groups active in Britain, with each attempting to fill the vacuum caused by the collapse of the British National party. The most significant of these new groups has been the English Defence League.

The EDL and similar counter-jihad extremist groups differ from the old far-right in three ways. First, they are less interested in elections than street-based provocation, with the EDL staging at least 50 significant protests across the country since 2009. Second, they have fluid borders, with footsoldiers flowing in and out, making it difficult to track their evolution and links to other groups. While rejecting a formal membership, the EDL could once claim over 80,000 followers on Facebook and also rejected the crude ‘whites-only’ membership policy of older far-right movements. Third, rather than attempt to rally mass support through a broad ideological programme, counter-jihad extremists are principally preoccupied with the ‘threat’ from Islam and Muslim communities. They seldom focus on other issues, and are united by their determination to frame Islam and British Muslims as posing a fundamental threat to the national identity and values of native Britons.

Yet the EDL remains under-researched and poorly understood. My latest research for Chatham House draws on a survey with YouGov to probe the backgrounds and concerns of some 300 ‘self-identified’ EDL supporters, as well as over 1,600 members of the wider population.

The results suggest that some of the best-known stereotypes about the EDL are, in fact, wrong. For example, support is not anchored solely among the young: only 16 per cent of EDL supporters are aged between 18 and 29 years old. In fact, most are over 44 years old. Nor are they simply uneducated. While most left school at the age of 16 or 17, fewer than one in 10 had no qualifications whatsoever. Yet more intriguing is the finding that this support is not confined to the working class: more than half of the EDL supporters in our sample are actually working in professional, managerial and routine non-manual occupations. They are no more likely than average to be unemployed, and they are no more likely than average to live in social housing.

Nor did we find much evidence to suggest that this is primarily about political apathy. Those who agree with the EDL were more likely to vote at the 2010 general election and less likely to refuse to identify with one of the three main parties. Revealingly, most actually voted Conservative, with 46 per cent of the EDL supporters in our sample voting for the centre-right in 2010, compared to 20 per cent who voted Labour. They were four times more likely than their fellow citizens to vote for either the BNP or the United Kingdom Independence party, but only eight per cent of them actually did so. And nor do they appear to have given up on the political system: only eight per cent of them thought that the political system in Britain is broken beyond repair.

So what are their guiding concerns? The EDL supporters in our survey expressed overwhelming levels of concern about immigration, rising ethnic and cultural diversity and their effects on the country. Within this worldview, Islam represents only one of several ‘threats’ to their national identity and way of life. When given the option, they actually rank immigration, not Islam, as the most pressing issue facing the country, followed by the economy, and then ‘Muslims in Britain’ a distant third. But these concerns are deep, intense and wrapped in an extremely pessimistic outlook. Counter-jihad groups frame their narratives in apocalyptic terms, offering a vision of a society in which groups are embroiled in communal violence, and where violence may be needed to protect the native group from ‘militant Islam’. These narratives are reflected in our findings. Large majorities feel strongly that the rising number of Muslims in Britain (now the second fastest-growing religious group in the country behind the non-religious) as a threat: 82 per cent see birth rates within Muslim communities as a threat to national identity and 80 per cent view the growth of these communities as a threat to the survival of white Britons. Eight in 10 EDL supporters endorse the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, which lies at the core of counter-jihad thinking. The number believing that violence may be needed to protect their group from threats is almost twofold higher than the national average.

Overall, there is little evidence to support those who trace extremist groups like the EDL to economic inequality, austerity or political apathy. Instead, what we find is a pool of citizens who feel profoundly threatened by immigration, who see little to gain from rising diversity, and are deeply pessimistic about the future direction of Britain. Calming and unpacking these deeply held anxieties will be one crucial challenge for policymakers. Undertaking further research on these groups and their more strongly committed supporters is another. But, until now, many of our basic assumptions appear to have been flawed.

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Matthew Goodwin is associate professor in politics at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of The Roots of Extremism: The English Defence League and the Counter-Jihad Challenge

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Photo: Jos Van Zetten